Iran, Israel, & the Iron Dice Of War
How Cognitive Bias Blinds Us In War—And In Life
We could have been in World War 3 by now.
The “12 Day War” between Iran and Israel ended as suddenly as it began.
It started with Israel’s preemptive strike on June 13, escalated when the U.S. bombed Iran on June 22, and ended in an uneasy ceasefire days later - brokered by America in a moment that could have spiraled into a global war involving Iran’s allies: China and Russia.
It’s also an opportunity to reflect on how confused our thinking can be in such scenarios, and to make our thinking clearer.
It was my first time having the tools and the interest to follow a war breaking out, essentially in real time.
The ubiquity of social media and citizen journalism made it possible to track both the sentiment of the masses and statements by leaders up to the minute.
Imagine if we had seen Bush, Bin Laden, and Saddam tweeting their bluffs and threats during the Iraq War.
That’s what we just witnessed with Trump, Khamenei, and Netanyahu.
Impossible Choices
This access to open information made another thing obvious: war is a series of impossible choices.
79% of Americans opposed going to war with Iran.
But 85% opposed Iran getting a nuke.
Obviously the ideal outcome would have been no Iranian nuke, and no war.
But when actually making a decision, one must prioritize and ask oneself: what’s more important?
Iran not getting a nuke, or America not going to war?
All efforts to stop Iran getting a nuke through force risk war.
A refusal to go to war risks Iran getting a nuke.
The privilege of not being a decision-maker is that we get to offer opinions without needing to make tradeoffs.
And many commenters took full advantage of that privilege - making arguments rooted in binaries instead of probabilities.
Cognitive Biases
Much of both the “anti-war” and “anti-nuke” camp were captured by two forms of cognitive bias.
The first is motivated reasoning: the tendency to reason in service of your preferred conclusion.
An active form of motivated reasoning is only searching for evidence that confirms the conclusion you already formed.
The passive form of this is confirmation bias - the tendency to notice information that confirms your view, and ignore evidence that counters it.
Here are examples of how it showed up in each camp.
Anti-war:
“Netanyahu has been saying Iran is on the verge of nukes for 30 years”
→ Needs to be weighed against the fact that Iran increased their uranium stockpile by 50% from February-May.
“Netanyahu said Saddam Hussein had nukes, and that wasn’t true. This is Iraq all over again”
→ Needs to be weighed against the fact that Netanyahu said Syria has a secret nuclear program in 2007, and was right).
Anti-nuke:
“Iran has 60% enriched uranium. There is no civilian purpose for that”
→ Needs to be weighed against the fact that Iran has been doing that since 2021, and only started doing so after Trump exited the deal stopping Iran from doing that in 2018)
“Iran always lies, definitely wants a nuke no matter what, and can’t be reasoned with”
→ Needs to be weighed against the fact that Iran did limit their uranium enrichment to 3.67% before Trump exited the deal.)
This is related to our second form of bias:
